"Yeah... after I dropped out, I didn't want to come back here." He takes a breath to look around. He continues to pile things out.
"I had a guy I knew online who lived around here. He had an apartment with 8 people that were staying there."
"It was the best time of my entire life. There were eight people there who lived there, all we did was play video games, watch movies, do drugs, and fuck each other. We all woke up at 2 pm every day and people were asleep on beds near my monitor setup. We had blackout curtains over all the windows, and the lights had gone out months before I had got there, and nobody had bothered to fix them. We all just wore the same pajamas or underwear, old hoodies from school teams that didn't exist anymore."
He continues to move stuff around in the closet. He sits down to dig away at it.
"They have this system where they sell excess computing power to corporations, but the real money we made was by hosting a bunch of pirated software. We did it all on the internet from the business next door. With welfare on top of that, we were able to make rent, and pay for fast food delivery."
"..."
"I didn't want to dig in to what my parents had left yet."
"..."
"There was one day that we tried to wake one of the girls who had lived there up, because we needed a healer for a raid, but. She was dead. None of us knew why, but none of us were surprised either. The problem is that criminals have no recourse, you know? If we told the cops, we'd have to, you know, explain everything we were doing. As far as we know, she didn't have parents either. Or, at least real parents, I mean..."
He loses himself in the story for a moment, leaning back.
"So, you know, it was a pain. The seven of us, we took a trip into the forest near here and sweating in the cold air. We dug a big hole with shovels that still had their tags on them and left her alone."
"..."
"...It's funny, but all I remember of that night is thinking about how far away the stars were."
"After that, because I was the new guy, they made me get on her PC to keep her identity... and her subscription services... persisting. As far as all her friends know, she's still on vacation. But then, eventually, things went back to normal, and we got a new healer. It was the same as it was before, except there was a room that nobody ever went in."
He goes back into digging, finding a larger desktop unit before dragging it out, placing it on the floor.
"A few months after that, I yelled a bunch of shit at the others after an argument relating to Genshin GBJ. They kicked me out. In the night, I took Ophelia's- the girl who died- PC too. She had a good unit, and, like, what were they gonna do, call a cop?" (edited)